Daily Archives: July 23, 2014

France is poised to sell two Mistral war-ships to Moscow. London has been hosting the fortunes and déboires of Russian oligarchs for years now, not to mention its political parties and individual politicians receiving a steady stream of contributions from these oligarch’s wives and close relations since 2007. In addition to that, it emerges that, despite vehement protestations, the UK continues to sell weapons to Russia, as evidenced in a recently released parliamentary report. It would appear that the value of licences rocketed by more than half in the last year from £86m to £131.5m in terms of arms sales.

Germany is known to have long and tight ties with Russia, not only due to the ironically volatile but at the same time extremely solid gas connection, but also due to huge exports and investments that Germany has in Russia: 300,000 German jobs depend on trade with Russia, 6,200 companies with German owners are active in Russia, and German companies have invested €20 billion there.

These are only Europe’s largest economies’ relations with Russia. As one blog describes the entanglements of Russia’s richest, they have estates in the UK, Castles in Germany, Greek Islands, you name it.

No wonder then that in the aftermath of the MH-17 disaster we are witness to a pathetic cacophony of condemnation and cuddling of Russia, which further undermines European countries’ credibility as democracies.

Yet, in the ensuing schoolyard brawl between England and France, between them and Germany, and everyone against the US, the bigger picture that never gets mentioned is that dealings with Russia (and with China for that matter) have been accepted for years in the name of more profits, more high yielding investments and in the idea that, eventually, through economic development its system will change. Even today a reputable British paper upholds this thesis.

The discourse of getting people more (stable) jobs and income was fully used in this process, thus entangling further not only European leadership and businesses with criminal regimes, but ordinary citizens, who more than happily choose not to think what happens with the weapons, warships, cars and many other things that they produce. I woke up this morning wondering what would I be doing were I a worker participating in the building of one of the Mistral ships that France has agreed to deliver to the Russians by the end of 2014. Would I just gloss over the news and say “it’s their dirty business, I am just trying to make an honest living”?

Frankly, the answer I reached was different, at the very least I would start looking for another job, and resign. Other options would be to try to mobilise internally in the company and see if the management were amenable to a protest action or to an action that de-legitimises this sale and another, even more socially engaged, would be to mobilise protests to raise awareness about what this sale means. Because what it means is that somewhere in France, an honest worker trying to keep his family, through a fragmented chain of contracts and deals, essentially participates in acts perpetrated by a regime which at best is demagogic and at its worst is criminal. This is after all the genius of capitalist production: an infinite division of labour separating the labourer from the ultimate consequences of their work, thus numbing any type of conscience or impact it might otherwise have on them.

It is easy to speak like this when one is not actually in this situation, and the article published today in Le Monde on the subject shows well the rock and the hard place in between which France finds itself on this matter: its fledgling economy can ill afford further loss of jobs and revenue. However, this is only so in the space of the capitalist and neo-liberal discourse which its leaders, like many others have adopted and perpetrated until it does not work anymore.

As I live and breathe in this world, it becomes apparent to me every day that even as simple citizens we can no longer abide such a course of things. The more feeble and illegitimate political power becomes, and the less representative the elected appear to be, the more that means that responsibility is devolved to citizens, and they must make their voice heard as to what they feel and think the course of things should be. That might involve tough choices such as taking paycuts, and job losses, and enduring periods of hardships. Because the truth is that even when we think that by doing otherwise we keep such dangers at bay, the system is such that it can only bring a delay, but not stop the inevitable, which is not joblessness and poverty (that is only just a stage) but eventual moral collapse and loss of any intrinsic humanity we might have. And if you think I speak as a prophet of doom, check what certain Israelis are doing these days, while Gaza is being bombed. Such people bring humanity one step closer to its worse nightmares and are the product of a radicalised version of the system we currently bathe in.

That being said, my thesis is predicated on the belief that humans have a moral compass and are capable to define and express courses of action that are mindful of their kin. Centuries of war and ongoing conflicts show us this is not something that happens naturally, and checks and balances must be put in place for this to be achieved.

We must never ever delegate those, though, away from our human interest and personal responsibility.

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In this episode Tales of the world takes an experimental route to make a point. Enjoy a multi-track and polyvocal creation taking a stab at the fact that we are so well informed on just about everything, and yet, somehow, we can’t or won’t go beyond that.

On a sunny day in January 2015, while taking a break from very serious interviews in Kathmandu, we went for a visit at the Swayambhunath temple (the monkey temple). Amidst many playful and warring monkeys we also found a singing bowls shop, owned by Saran Sahi, a real artist, who very gracefully shared some of his musical art with us. Here are some of his sounds, found, recorded, edited, photographed and enabled by our Nepal production team.

Rahel Kunz ; Lekh Nath Paudel; Ruxandra Stoicescu

If you plan to go to Kathmandu and get a bowl of your own or at least a sound massage you can contact Saran Shahi at saranshahi98@gmail.com

Acronyms, abbreviations and hashtags. Credit cards, smart phone apps and bookmarks. Promises, repression and lies, our lives are full of shortcuts to knowledge, information, power, wealth and entertainment. Everyday, whether we need them or not, we take them, every day, whether we like it or not, someone else takes them, too.

Growing up in Romania – the country of all possibilities, as bitter-sweet Romanians affectionately call her – one learns everything there is to know about shortcuts. And really quickly too, for one simple reason: Romanians have perfected the art of the shortcut, like none other. Some cynical ones even use a shortcut in their terminology, by bundling all type of shortcuts present in Romania under only one term: theft. Unfortunately, the inordinately high levels of corruption exhibited by the country – with 20% more people than the EU’s 76% average of the population believing corruption to be a widespread phenomenon – seem to support the somewhat fatalistic idea, held by many Romanians, that theirs is a people of thieves.

Tempting as that might be, I’ll leave the theorizing on this topic to specialists, because, what interests me in the Romanian case is not whether we are, or not, more inclined than others towards thievery and corruption. Rather, I’d like to go behind the curtains of these apparently despicable acts and understand in what spirit they happen. Whether it’s paying an official in order to be able to exempt you from queuing for paying your taxes, embezzling EU funds to get a house and an SUV faster than you can say “European Commission”, or bribing the policeman so that they do not take your driving license, even if you did cross on red at 20km over the speed limit, all these acts are reminiscent of the communist times, when people living in one reality needed to pretend to live in another. So they took shortcuts, as the ones mentioned above, in order to escape the constraints of their lives. Shortcuts to riches and titles, shortcuts to health and power, shortcuts which, more that material thefts, were really, thefts of time. The whole communist system, based on scientific socialism, which claimed it had reached the highest stage of peace and human development merely through its existence, was predicated on a fundamental theft of time. We were already there, you see, not sure though, how we had gotten so far. To hold this idea one needed to perpetrate the system, in order to cover up what came short, each time, of authentic accomplishment.

How are we different today from such a system? Us, post-modern individuals caught in the race for speedy conclusions and speedy results, wonder kids of the age of technology, who seem to know an answer before we know the question?

The shortcuts of our everyday lives make us powerless thieves of time, lost in the lull of a moment when nothing and no one seems to have noticed the deception, leading us to expect that maybe, just maybe, there is a shortcut to life.

This podcast can be listened in combination with Tales of the world episode 52 – Life fragments, fragments of life, March 2014, and episode 10, April 2012.

Buying furniture in an IKEA shop is perhaps one of the most uncontroversially universal experiences of modern life. We know that even Syrian refugees and Indian fakirs are not spared the trials and tribulations of the products of the IKEA imperium. Much as I wanted to avoid it, I was not spared, either. To make the experience a little more bearable, and quite frankly, trying to understand what makes it so pervasive and seemingly unavoidable, I went to the store armed with the sharpest version of my sense of observation and inquiry.I will spare you, my dear friends, the details, which it is likely, you know quite well. All details but one. It caught my imagination as I was heading towards the exit of the shop. We had stocked almost all the pieces we went to acquire, except for one which had to be paid for at the cashiers, and recuperated after that. We received a slip of paper to give to the person in charge, who recorded it on a computer. And plop, on the computer screen split into 3 colours, red-for ordering, blue – for “in process” and green – for delivery, I could follow the five minutes procedure. I knew Ikea was the epithom of labour division, but somehow, this whole operation felt wrong. Why is there a need to split a gesture in its modular components, as if it were one of the furniture pieces the store itself sells? What could be the sense and consequence of that? Of time exploded into the tiny atoms of its passing.

Later that day, in a twist of coincidence, I heard another IKEA story, from another country. A couch acquired from the store promptly returned to it, simply because those in charge of delivery did not want to make the effort to put it through the door of the residence where it was meant to be. It required a little bending of practical sense, which, seemingly, was not on the menu for the carriers. IKEA accepted the return of the couch, and its refund, saying that it outsourced its delivery service, which practically, could not care less about whether the products were actually delivered, or not. Such an attitude flying in the face of everything we consider normal commercial logic, is quite frankly, staggering. My mind flew instantly to Karl Marx and his theory of alienation. He was clever enough to predict that the endless division and fragmentation of labour would provoke in the long run, the spiritual and physical alienation of labourers, which thusly, could be easier to control. He did not insist, however, on the effects this would have in the very long run: alienation stops serving the interests of capitalism and, inadvertently, turns on it. Not because it plans to, not because it can, but rather because the shortsightedness of its condition only allows it a very limited scope of action and little or no perspective. Without a semblance of sense and identification with the aim of the operation individuals participate in, individual work becomes fragmented gestures, and fragmented gestures eventually become a series of disconnected, senseless actions, with, paradoxically, all encompassing effects: the implosion of the global articulation through the bankruptcy of individual pieces.

Much the same happens in politics. Fragmentation causes a vacuum of responsibility and in the long run, a vacuum of autonomy. Without a certain degree of autonomy of its members, the system stops being able to adapt to changes and crumbles.He might not have insisted on it in the very long run, but Marx did quote Ferguson, a master of Adam Smith, referring to the increasing fragmentation and specialisation of work: we make a nation of healots and have no free citizens. The problem is, most intellectuals seem to think that the loss of freedom is the end of the story. It takes poets and writers to show that is just the beginning. Of a brave new world…

We live in a time when all the epochs blend: it’s the axial age of global social and political transformations, it is the middle ages, with their fragmentarium of beliefs in wonders and aberrations, the Renaissance of humanist tendencies, and the industrial age, all at once. A time of abject material and spiritual poverty and luxuriant growth.

In no age have differences lived closer to each other and never has the violence of making them disappear been exercised with more intensity. Some analysts show this to be done in the name of harmony, coherence and seeming logic. Take for example Alexandra Ourousoff and her brilliant book, Wall Street at War. It is an anthropologist’s analysis of the encounter between big business managers and the analysts employed by credit rating agencies, which in fact, is a conflict between two kinds of logic: one, in line with traditional capitalism, which says that in order to have profits, it is necessary to take risks, and the other one, in line with sanitized but, paradoxically, ruthless, capitalism, which holds that risks can be fully controlled, unpredictability equals loss, and profits are about sticking to carefully planned strategies.

The most interesting point made by this book is that the arrogance stemming from this encounter lies in the fact that each side, – although, in truth, it seems to be more often the analysts, and more seldom the managers – believes to be the holder of the right reading and vision of things, to the point of invalidating the other’s. The end result is one hiding away from the other, the mangers tricking the analysts into believing they respect them, at the same time getting entangled in a web of lies and practices meant to keep appearances, which eventually lead to collapse and crisis.For more juicy details, read the book. For my part, what I find telling is the apparent divergence between social and political developments – throughout the world – and the homogenizing and standardizing drives which are still being forcefully pushed worldwide by big business and financial institutions, as illustrated by this book and by the news.As people are gradually starting to react and organise themselves against abuses, as protests testify to an explosion of diversity and willingness to take charge of our own lives, many governments yield even further to capitalist drives: for an example, there are talks about a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between Europe and the US which would eventually let big corporations overrule national laws and interests, as well as mechanisms to protect citizens, while servicing their profits. This is already happening in many parts of the world, do we need to institutionalize instead of resisting it?

Let us not be fooled, however: the battle is not between capitalists and the antis, between the rich and the poor. The battle is for gaining the power to define people’s lives. In these times of crisis, when, on the one hand, the sense of words and concepts is destabilised, and on the other, we have not yet new definitions and understandings found, the victor will be the one who most convincingly supplies their reading of the world to a majority of people. It is, therefore, up to us to explore, if we wish to define ourselves as homogeneous, contradiction-free and profit-yielding robots or incongruent, multi-dimensional and vibrant human beings.

A peculiar feature of BBC news draws attention because of the use of numerous quotation marks in its titles, prompting the question: “do we live life between inverted commas?”

After intense research, including the reading of a book on the practice, Why do we quote, by Ruth Finnegan, here is what Tales of the world has surmised:

Inverted commas have a long and quite surprising history: from marginal notes in ancient Greek and Roman texts, meant to attract attention to parts within a text, the diplés, the original quotation marks composed of two oblique lines meeting in the shape of an arrow came a long way to our days.

Their role changed with the appearance of printing and the evolution of authorship ant its intellectual property rights. During the Renaissance, up to the century 19th, quotation marks were used in literary works on and off, as authors liked to borrow and build upon each other, with no ill intentions. In a way, their gesture reminded of the fact that texts used in the olden times to be voiced aloud, recited or proclaimed, and not silently read. One does not stop in the middle of fiery speech to say, oh, and now, I am going to cite Chaucer, father of English literature, lest they want to miss their mark and finish with a whimper what started with a bang.

But all this change and transformation sends us straight to the heart of the matter: voice. Voice of an author, of the one who uses his words, in the particular case of this story, of the journalists and newsreels that take words and phrases in between quote marks to communicate…what exactly? Here I am going to do a bit of my own quoting, from author Ruth Finnegan who wrote an entire book on the history of this practice:Quoting is used for originality or routine; for challenging authority or for lauding it; to control or to rebel; for excluding or including; for passive memorising or for brilliant extemporisation and creatively applied insight. As an act of speech quoting can achieve many things, from affirming or subverting or manipulating tradition to uplifting in sermon or imposing rigours on the young. Others’ words and voices can be called on to convey irony or humour, to situate writer, speaker and character in narrative, to carry the voice of the divine, to bond within a group or to distance from it”.Which of these happen when newsreels use their quote marks to report on current affairs, big and small, nowadays? When they title “Super rich looking for bling bling”, where Looking for bling bling is in between quotation marks and in an article on Lampedusa’s latest tragic delivery of migrants: “It’s horrific, like a cemetery, they are still bringing them out,” all of it between inverted commas. Are we supposed to smirk at the first one and get serious, maybe weep, at the second one? I feel like weeping about both. The choice is, of course, ours, because, from the newscaster’s point of view it’s all, neutrally and objectively quoted … reality.

As we continue to make use of citation marks sometimes to signify what’s real and sometimes to question it, how will we know when our journey down the rabbit whole is done?

When a coding error in an oft-quoted economic paper supporting austerity turns out to be more of a thinking habit than a random slip of research, it is time to reflect on a latin proverb taken right out of my secondary school classes: errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum…et tertium non datur.